Cooking the Medallia's Books

Quite possibly, Medallia offers your hotel one of the most reliable tools for measuring service quality and guest feedback. It is non-biased, random and as accurate as possible ….that is until somebody tries to manipulate it, turning this unique moneymaking tool into a useless hollow drum.

Of course, there are always shoppers, shop calls, internal audits and third-party websites that try to give hotels access to important guest service information. Each has its own pros and cons: shoppers are subjective and too few and far between; shop calls just score phone conversations; third party web sites are about as valid and accurate as your ex-employees’ viewpoints and internal audits are biased.

Instead, Medallia’s reports are created from the e-mail feedback from actual hotel guests; each hotel receives 20-50 reports, on average, each month n order to ensure that enough feedback is received and more answers means greater accuracy. Each guest contacted after his or her departure, so the temporary “feeling” about the particular hotel has faded, making the visitor’s overall opinion less biased and emotional. And the questions are much better than many other survey systems. For example, the LTR is proven to be directly related to how much money a hotel makes.

Proper analysis of Medallia reports helps with employee training and development, scheduling and budgeting while clearly indicating where hotel operators should invest or capitalize. However, Medallia is a money making feedback system unless somebody tries to trash it by manipulation it. Manipulation can occur in more than one way.

Some cheesy manipulation options are asking staff or friends to answer Medallia surveys or directly asking guests to score your high upon check out. Craftier methods involve asking departing guests whether the hotel will be scored 10 on all service levels so that guests subconsciously score the hotel 10.

Rest assured, attempting to cook Medallia’s books do hotels no good and instead simply mislead them. Efforts to manipulate guest responses mean hotels losing their main tools for establishing hotel service levels, correcting deficiencies and losing the ability to capitalize on strong points. Distorted reports are useless, sounding good, but with no substance. All one can do with this cooked-up “fools gold” is sell it to inexperienced investors and operators, possibly obtain a bonus as a result of bogus numbers. Simply put, manipulating Medallia numbers, Is not only unethical and wrong,  particularly if it is used to manipulate your superiors, but it also wastes valuable information that could be used to improve your hotel.

Upper management can help prevent Medallia’s manipulation by asking the right questions and creating the right action plans. Recognizing the weak categories that you need to work on and the strong categories to capitalize on is the productive approach.

Many franchisers and hotel companies have established ruses to prevent and punish Medallia manipulators on certain levels. That is good news; however operators need to follow through to protect the results of this very important survey.